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$xhtml = array(
	'<{title}>' => 'Little Caesars culture',
	'<{subtitle}>' => 'Written in <span title="Principles of Business Management">BUS 1101</span> of <a href="http://www.uopeople.edu/">University of the People</a>, finalised on 2017-01-05',
	'<{copyright year}>' => '2016-2017',
	'takedown' => '2017-11-01',
	'<{body}>' => <<<END
<p>
	I was a temporary employee working at a company for about two weeks, but other than that, there&apos;s only one company that I&apos;ve worked for yet: Torvic Company.
	Torvic Company is a franchise of Little Caesars Pizza, and aside from the name on our paychecks, the name &quot;Torvic Company&quot; doesn&apos;t really come up anywhere.
	For all intents and purposes, our restaurant locations are just Little Caesars Pizza stores; we are the face of Little Caesars Pizza.
	So, what signs of Little Caesars culture do our employees see in their daily lives?
</p>
<h2>Mission statement</h2>
<p>
	The Little Caesars mission statement is &quot;To be an innovative global leader by focusing on convenience, exceeding customer expectations with extraordinary value and great tasting products, provided by outstanding people resulting in strong returns to our stakeholders.&quot; (Little Caesar Enterprises, Inc., n.d.).
	However, this mission statement isn&apos;t well-communicated to employees.
	As an employee, I had no idea what the mission statement was until I looked it up.
	Likewise, the mission statement isn&apos;t even available on the Little Caesars website, at least not any more.
	I had to ask the Internet Archive for help on that.
	Little Caesars Pizza is no longer communicating its mission statement to the general public.
	It&apos;s somewhat difficult for the mission statement to influence the corporate culture when no one knows what the mission statement even is.
</p>
<p>
	However, even without proper communication of the mission statement, the mission statement does seem to reflect our actions.
	We do provide convenience, keeping our products ready by making them before people order them.
	That way, when customers make a selection, we can provide what they want right away.
	We do provide value.
	You&apos;d be hard-pressed to find a pizza restaurant that provides better pizzas for lower prices.
	We do provide great-tasting products, or at least I&apos;m told that we do.
	As a vegan, I can&apos;t eat anything that we serve, besides the cups of plain marinara sauce, as everything else that we serve has cheese on it.
	We even throw out pizzas that have been kept too long without getting sold, ensuring great taste and quality in all of the pizzas that we do serve.
</p>
<h2>Stories and language</h2>
<p>
	We don&apos;t really have very many stories here at Little Caesars Pizza.
	I assume that there&apos;s not much to tell, as the job&apos;s not the most eventful.
	We do have one story about a person that stuck their hands in one of the machines, a machine covered in warning labels saying <strong>*not*</strong> to do that.
	One of their fingers got ripped up pretty badly.
	It&apos;s a cautionary tale, preventing others from making the same foolish mistake.
	When a machine is covered in warning labels, perhaps you should listen to them.
	We also have a story about a time when the dough sheeter stopped working.
	One person thought that they should call the repair person that we always call whenever anything breaks.
	Another thought that it would be quicker to hotwire the machine, so that&apos;s what they did.
	However, the next day, the machine exploded and nearly injured three people.
	The flames were about half a meter out from the machine.
	Again, this is a cautionary tale.
	When the machines break, they need actual repairs.
	Hotwiring them is a bad idea.
	These stories show a side of our culture that&apos;s about protecting our employees from bodily harm.
	We try to keep the work place safe; we don&apos;t need extra hazards that can be avoided.
</p>
<p>
	We use language more frequently than stories.
	We call the pepperoni pizzas &quot;peps&quot; for short, and strangely, we call the Hawaiian pizzas &quot;hulas&quot;, which is short for &quot;Hula Hawaiians&quot;.
	Corporate named the pizzas &quot;Hula Hawaiians&quot; to try to differentiate them from our competition&apos;s pizzas, but almost none of our customers actually call them that.
	We also call our cheese breads &quot;ICBs&quot;, which is short for &quot;Italian cheese breads&quot;, though simply &quot;cheese breads&quot; is even shorter to say.
	Our language shows a side of our culture that&apos;s all about branding, but that also focuses on speed.
</p>
<p>
	As for me, I don&apos;t buy into the silly terminology, and simply call our products what they are: cheese breads and Hawaiian pizzas.
	Does that mean that I don&apos;t fit with the corporate culture? If I fit the corporate culture better, would I be more inclined to use the silly terminology that the rest of our employees use? Could I fit in here better? Probably not.
	I use the generic names for products even at home; I prefer to just call things what they are, not focus on brand names.
</p>
<h2>Physical layout</h2>
<p>
	The physical layout of our store is very open, once you get behind the counter.
	We do have a back room in which we do the dishes and some other preparation work, but for the most part, all tasks are handled in one big room with a stack of three large ovens in the center.
	This open layout is very conductive to our culture, which involves freely moving about and handling different tasks as need be.
	In the evenings, we have many employees on duty, so moving about doesn&apos;t happen as much.
	However, if one station is ahead and another is behind, employees can shift as needed.
	We&apos;re a team, so if one station is having trouble keeping up, it&apos;s not exclusively their job to deal with it; we help them catch back up.
	Likewise, in the morning, we have too few employees for each to be assigned a specific task.
	Instead, employees drift around the shop, making sure that all tasks are completed.
</p>
<h2>Rules and policies</h2>
<p>
	Our rules and policies seem to favor decentralization somewhat, but also favor centralization in some ways.
	For example, our franchise owner is allowed to set our own prices.
	While corporate raised the prices of our pizzas on the national level, our franchise owner decided not to do that.
	Our franchise owner decided that our five dollar pizzas were one of our biggest competitive advantages, so they left the price the same as it&apos;s been for ages.
	That said, corporate does choose how certain other things are handled.
	Some of our more arbitrary policies are checked up upon during corporate inspections.
	For example, if we don&apos;t stack our pizza pans exactly ten high, we&apos;ll get marked down during the inspection.
</p>
<p>
	However, despite this balance of centralization and decentralization, decentralization seems to be the stronger side in our culture.
	Between corporate inspections, our managers often give us instructions that specifically contradict those given by corporate.
	For example, we&apos;re told that during an inspection, we should stack the pizza pans ten high, but between inspections, we&apos;re told to stack them twenty high.
</p>
<p>
	We&apos;re allowed to listen to whatever music we want at work, and many of us bring mobile devices into the store and play music off of those.
	Most people use an Internet radio service, but some of us, such as myself, keep local playlists on our devices, which makes for an advertisement-free experience.
	Certain people seem to take precedence, so when they&apos;re around, they choose what we listen to.
	If none of those people are around though, whoever sets their music up first gets to choose.
	I think that this shows that in our culture, we want work to be an enjoyable experience.
	Being productive doesn&apos;t need to be a drag.
</p>
<p>
	Our rules and policies actively promote teamwork.
	We succeed as a team or we fail as a team (except that we don&apos;t fail, we only have minor setbacks).
	Whenever the head manager is in, they always emphasize this need for teamwork by talking about how we&apos;ve succeeded through teamwork that day, and saying things such as &quot;Good job, team!&quot;.
</p>
<h2>Rituals</h2>
<p>
	We don&apos;t really have any official rituals.
	Officially, we&apos;re pretty mundane.
</p>
<p>
	However, we do sometimes have unofficial rituals, depending on our managers.
	For example, we used to have a fun shift leader that hosted Dance Party Tuesday, which unintuitively occurred every Sunday, never on a Tuesday.
	Basically, we&apos;d just play music with a great beat while we worked, dancing somewhat if there was time between tasks.
	Our culture seems to change a bit based on who&apos;s in charge at the moment.
	Under the supervision of some shift leaders, the mood is somewhat tense and there&apos;s no room for fun.
	Under the supervision of others, there&apos;s plenty of room for fun and fun is encouraged.
	Dance Party Tuesday was a great example of a ritual showing the culture under the supervision of a specific one of the shift leaders, a culture not present under other shift leaders.
</p>
<p>
	One ritual that doesn&apos;t change between shift leaders though is that we also add random amusing things around the store, provided that they&apos;re not disruptive or in the way.
	For example, we have two walk-in refrigerators, which we call walk-ins.
	On one of them, the one that&apos;s within customer view from our drive-through window, someone put up a printed photograph of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org./wiki/Christopher_Walken">Christopher Walken</a>, an actor with a surname that sounds similar to &quot;walk-in&quot;.
	It amuses us, and it amuses some of our more watchful customers as well, who comment on it.
	I didn&apos;t even know who Christopher Walken was until that photograph was put up.
	On the walk-in in the back, there&apos;s a label displaying the name and abbreviation of the company that made it: IB Imperial Brown.
	Soon after this walk-in was installed, someone covered up the word &quot;Imperial&quot; with a paper with the word &quot;Doc&quot;, then put up a drawing of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org./wiki/Emmett_Brown">Doc Brown</a>, a character from a movie.
	It now reads &quot;IB Doc Brown&quot; (which sounds like &quot;I be Doc Brown&quot;, as in &quot;I am Doc Brown&quot;), which is accurately represented by the image.
	While not a very formal ritual, we do make a habit of adding fun little things around the workplace whenever situations change and a new opportunity arises.
	Again, these rituals tend to show our cultural emphasis on keeping the workplace fun and informal.
</p>
<div class="APA_references">
	<h2>References:</h2>
	<p>
		Little Caesar Enterprises, Inc. (n.d.). Little Caesars US Franchise Development &gt; About Us &gt; Our Philosophy. Retrieved from <a href="https://web.archive.org./web/20160426024655/https://franchise.littlecaesars.com./AboutUs/OurPhilosophy.aspx"><code>https://web.archive.org./web/20160426024655/https://franchise.littlecaesars.com./AboutUs/OurPhilosophy.aspx</code></a>
	</p>
</div>
END
);
